Regular exercise has been considered a key to open the door for a longer health span. It could delay the onset of 40 chronic conditions/diseases, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, or some mental diseases [
12]. However, traditional sports events (e.g., running, hiking, football, etc.) are dominated by outdoor activities, which are significantly influenced by weather conditions (rainy, windy, temperature, etc.) or other special situations (e.g., coronavirus disease 2019 [COVID-19] pandemic) (Fig.
1A). In this case, doing exercises indoor or even working out at home is highly desired; this therefore promotes new commercial opportunities, typified by the Nintendo switch. They have developed a series of motion-sensing games through portable designs and achieved great commercial success, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. One key component of these human–machine interface (HMI) systems should be the direction sensors that are integrated into the potable external devices (e.g., Joy-con) and could respond to angular velocity or accelerations. Unfortunately, relevant commercial angular velocity or acceleration sensors generally adopt piezoresistive or capacitive mechanisms, and power consumption issues seriously hinder their scalable utilizations [
13]. In this regard, because of their miniaturized configurations, easy fabrication protocols, high output, and cost-effectiveness, the emerging triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) provide promising energy solutions [
14–
23]. Efforts have been devoted to developing self-powered TENG-based direction sensors for human health monitoring fields. For example, Xu et al. [
24] have reported a spring-like TENG for vibration energy collection and acceleration sensing, Xie et al. [
25] developed a self-powered angle sensor utilizing a rotation TENG, and Shi et al. [
26] have constructed a self-powered gyroscope ball for both acceleration and angular velocity detection. However, the above-mentioned direction sensors mostly react to either vertical motion and acceleration, or planar motion and angular velocity. Limited detection dimensions as well as poor wearable comfort block their further applications. More importantly, existing strategies extract the motion information from obtained triboelectric signals by simply differentiating the signal amplitudes or peak numbers [
27–
29], which are not perfectly adapted to our unpredictable and complex daily movements. The burgeoning Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoTs, the combination of artificial intelligence technology with IoT technology) provides a new strategy to unlock the shackles of technology [
30–
33]. Specifically, wearable electronic devices in IoT collect and transmit sensory data to the cloud, and the data are then remotely analyzed by artificial intelligence algorithms (e.g., machine learning or deep learning algorithms), which is an efficient way to learn higher-level features of the raw input signals, especially for the triboelectric featured dynamic sensing signals [
34–
36]. Besides, with the onset of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), various gaming-based HMIs are developed [
37–
41]. Such functionality-enhanced HMI systems facilitate the user to absorb the virtual space that will pave a new way to construct the immersive VR sport system (Fig.
1B).